Pre-Commercial Procurement: Design, develop, and demonstrate wave energy converter systems (EuropeWave PCP).

Tender description

This contract award notice informs interested operators about the outcome of a tender. On 7 July 2021, a contract notice was published in TED as part of the EU project EuropeWave to purchase R&D services from a number of R&D providers in parallel (PCP procurement). The PCP procurement compared competing alternative solution approaches to address the following challenge: The EuropeWave PCP aims to accelerate the design, development, and demonstration of cost-effective wave energy converter (WEC) systems to produce clean electricity, advance promising designs for wave energy converter systems to a point from which they are ready to proceed to a first of a kind commercial-scale design and testing programme and commercial exploitation through other national/regional programmes and/or private sector investment. The main technical challenges to be addressed are: -Performance – obtain quantitative evidence of power capture and conversion capability and increase confidence in yield predictions from simulations. -Survivability – demonstrate effective survival strategies. -Availability – demonstrate levels of availability through reliable prototype operation. -Affordability – increase confidence in estimations of the technology costs (capital and operational) and the requirements to achieve a LCOE which is competitive in the target market. The culmination of the EuropeWave PCP programme (Phase 3) will see prototypes, at substantial scale and with fully representative subsystems, deployed at the open-water facilities of the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Scotland and the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) in the Basque Country and operated for a minimum period to demonstrate device performance, reliability and cost. Physical model testing in earlier phases is expected to take place in Instituto de Hidráulica Ambiental de Cantabria (IHC) and FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility (FloWave). This joint procurement exercise is being undertaken by Wave Energy Scotland in its role of lead procurer acting in the name and on behalf of the procurers of the EuropeWave buyers group: -Wave Energy Scotland -Ente Vasco de la Energía Lot 1: The procurement was announced in the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) In a PCP, R&D service contracts are awarded to several R&D service providers in parallel to progressively develop solutions in a phased approach. This allows the procurers to compare several design solutions in a competitive environment. The EuropeWave PCP combines the phased approach of the PCP model, a stage-gated industrial development process, and an international evaluation and guidance framework for ocean energy technology. Each selected operator will be awarded a framework agreement that covers up to three R&D phases: Phase 1: Concept development Phase 2: Design/modelling Phase 3: Open-sea deployment & testing programme After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to progressively select the best of the competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a call-off contract for the next phase, under the framework agreement. Phase 1 started in January 2022. Phase 3 is expected to start in September 2023 and conclude in May 2026. The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions. This procurement receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement No 883751. The EU is not participating as a contracting authority in the procurement. A total budget of 16 333 333 EUR was earmarked for awarding the contracts to a minimum of: - Minimum 5 / anticipated 7 contractors for phase 1 - Minimum 4 / anticipated 5 contractors for phase 2 and - Minimum 3 contractors for phase 3. The abstracts of the winning tenders are available on europewave.eu.